


The Dragon and The Dawn

by OMGitsgreen



Series: The Tales and Dreams of Dragons [10]
Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: Completed, Drabble Series, Gen, Headcanon, Origin Story, Original Dragon Warriors - Freeform, Original Dragons - Freeform, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 12:47:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3896890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OMGitsgreen/pseuds/OMGitsgreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Zeno awoke to familiar faces, his family in a different time. The brave and loving Hakuryuu, the caring and protective Seiryuu, the bold and yet gentle Ryokuryuu, and the strong and yet forgiving Hiryuu. Time had passed and things had changed, and yet they were here for him again, and Zeno was so thankful." The story of the adolescence of Zeno, the words of the Gods, and the families that he can smile for, forever. ITSCD side story, final original drabble</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dragon and The Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> The last story in the Original Drabbles series, hurray! Huzzah! I’m so glad you’ve all enjoyed this series, and I’ll set up a master post for anyone looking for all Drabbles together. Now for Zeno’s story. Please enjoy!

_"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves."_  
-Buddha

* * *

_“The moon is bright, the wind is quiet, The tree leaves hang over the window, My little baby, go to sleep quickly, Sleep, dreaming sweet dreams….”_

His mother hummed in soft summer sunlight, a warm, gentle, guiding hand that spun the creaky spinning wheel as Zeno rested his head on her lap. That place was his special place, where he could hear the turn of the wheel, his mother’s singing voice like breeze caressing the reeds by the river, lush and soft and made for lullabies as he rested there, lulled into a day-dream. She would tease him, telling him he grew too old to cling to her, that with his father working he was the man of the house, but as a child Zeno just shook his head and continued to rest there because it was only in those times that he felt peaceful. 

Because Zeno, as a child, didn’t understand who the Gods were and why they would speak to him, but knew they were noisy and annoying and would rather to listen to anything else. Once before he had learned that trick, had even stuck his head into the river to get some silence, but when he came home soaked, his mother had scolded him and he decided to find a new way to make them go away. They spoke incessantly, words and phrases ripped from the wind with no context, berating and yelling sometimes, others whispering warnings that made him shiver, sometimes pleading. But no matter what, if his mother’s hand pressed against his unruly mop of hair, and her voice filling the air with her warm lilting voice, the voices seemed distant and Zeno finally found peace.

_“The moon is bright, the wind is quiet, The cradle moving softly, My little one, close your eyes, Sleep, sleep, dreaming sweet dreams.”_

“Mother?” Zeno asked, looking up to her. Summer-sky eyes looked back, and her lips curved into a smile. His mother had never been strong in body, something she made up in with her ferocious capacity of love and vivacity. But something had gone wrong with her first birth, the child had been a stillborn, and had left her sickly and weak. But still, she desperately ached for a child. After much prayer and heartache, she had given birth to Zeno, her first and last baby, and never again been able to conceive. She called him her miracle, but Zeno was not so sure of that. His mother was truly pale and fragile orchid in a forest of oak, but even in the most rough terrain flowers still continued to bloom. And like that flower, his mother was truly the miracle to him.

“Yes, Zeno?”

“I love you.”

“And I, you.” She said, reaching to scoop him up and place him in her lap. She pressed raindrop kisses to his face, showering him with affection. “No matter what, your smile is the most precious thing to me.”

“I wouldn’t say that!” Zeno giggled as she continued to hold him in her arms.

“I certainly would. You are my greatest treasure.” His mother told him, “And a great gift to this world. All you have to do is smile, Zeno, and you can make this world a better place.”

“Really?” Zeno asked amazed and his mother laughed.

“Of course! Look how happy you’ve made me!” His mother exclaimed, and Zeno wrapped his arms around her and smiled against her neck. “Just don’t forget that one lesson, Zeno. Even when you grow up to be a fine man. Always remember to smile at the ones you love.”

Zeno nodded and folded himself against her, soaking up her warmth and light.

* * *

No matter how much one may will it, not all times can be happy in the life of those who lived upon the earth, those whose lives’ journeys were swayed by the esoteric whims of the Gods on high, who orchestrated their lives to suit their needs and desires. Fate wasn’t everything, Zeno would come to know. The actions and decisions of humans, their desires and their greed, as well as their happiness and their dreams could change the course of the world by themselves with their powers. But sometimes, events were inevitable, and at some point one just had to accept that reality.

Such was the case with his beautiful, loving mother. Though kind and wonderful and willful, her own body was her greatest enemy, and her weak constitution came to be her ruin. At ten, his mother developed a cough in the rainy season that refused to leave the shelter of her body festering within her lungs to became a rattle, and a fever that could never be broken soaked into her skin. By the spring she was upon her deathbed, her weight whittled away by her lack of appetite and her strength gone, evaporated like dew on the morning leaves. She had waned like a sliver of the moon, pale and thin, escaping into dreams most often and without the strength to even lift her head, lost to her unrestful sleep. Zeno, though he might pretend, knew that his mother was like the morning dew. Soon, she would disappear from the world without a trace, and then it would be him and his father left behind.

“Zeno…” She called to him, her voice scarcely a whisper her fingers twitching towards him. Zeno paused in his ladling of tea into her mouth and instead grasped her hand, cold and skeletal and limp. A smile tugged at her gaunt lips, stretching thin nearly translucent skin as she looked upon him, and Zeno smiled for her, as wide as he could. His father sat beside Zeno, unable to hide his own tears that slipped into his beard.

“Mother.” Zeno said before feeling his own tears betray him, his lips growing salty, but he still continued to smile, “I love you.”

“My miracle…no…matter…how far apart…I’ll always…be with you…” She whispered, her voice barely anything above a gentle hiss and a rattle.

“I know.” Zeno told her firmly. “I know.”

Suddenly she breathed out once, a sigh of relief, and he swore that just for a moment he was filled up with joy and life, and he felt the warm summer breeze kiss him before it faded away. Her hand was still, and his father, a gentle, kind man reached over to close his mother’s eyes, still crying himself.

“She truly loved you.” His father said, kissing both of his mother’s closed eyes.

“I know.” Zeno agreed, before finally letting the smile fall from his lips like a ripened fruit, and then bathing his mother’s still face with his tears of grief as his father pressed a warm hand to his back and cried with him.

* * *

The mornings were always the worst, Zeno thought. The ache that he desperately combated always seemed to deepen as time went on, and yet the world continued to move on despite his mother’s absence. He would sit by the old spinning wheel as the sun rose, pale yellow light streaming like ethereal ribbons upon its wooden frame, warming it even in the cool mornings, as if the ghost of her touch still lingered there for him to covet. He would listen as the birds called and the whispers of those far-removed voices floated in the air as weightless as petals all in vain for his mother’s lullaby never graced his ears.

Where are you? Zeno wished to ask the morning sun, the breeze, the dewdrops and birds, but knew in his heart that they could never answer him in return. You promised we would always be together. So where can I find you? Where can I go that will make this world seem bright again? Where can I be that will make me happy, because I feel so alone. I’m lost, Mother. What am I supposed to do?

And so he would curl up and cry on that seat, his unbidden tears and sobs forcing him to bit his own fist in order to stop up his sobs like a dam in the river, and sometimes he bit hard enough that copper and salt fouled his tongue which only made him wish to cry harder. He hated this world that he lived in without her. He would give anything, anything at all if only he could change it back. But he was only a mortal, Zeno knew, and mortals have no such powers. And so all he could do was cry as he tried to hang onto the remnants of his mother that remained.

It was during one of those mornings alone, when the sun peaked over the forests their village rested in, that he began to catch the strangest whispers in the wind. It began innocently enough, because it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been odd before. However, soon the voices grew louder and louder until Zeno could no longer hear himself think, their urgency and their desperation nearly drew Zeno over the edge of madness. They screamed and wailed over someone, someone who had left them. Someone who had fallen. It was so strange and odd that Zeno himself desperately tried to stop up his ears with linens and spent his days gripped in an agony so fierce that it nearly burned him away as his head tore itself apart. He clung to his father, digging his fingernails into his arms as he seized and threw up, and his father looked on equally helpless.

“Please make it stop.” Zeno begged him, “Please…” 

But his father couldn’t do anything but call to the healer in town, who was equally baffled by Zeno’s condition. She called it hysterics, grief, and had made his father and some other villager men bind Zeno down forcing a sleeping medicine down his throat. It did nothing but immobilize him as the voices kept him awake, captive by their own grief and cries. He desperately, weakly fought against his father as the healer forced open his mouth and the liquid slithered down his throat like a snake, intruding, forcing him into feverish sleep. No. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t lie captive in the dark with only those voices, those dreams ripping every fiber of his body apart, filling him with feelings and thoughts that didn’t belong to him, but even as he tried to tell them so, still more and more serum was forced down. 

“Mother.” He begged, desperately trying to reach her as he clawed and scratched at those who held him down, watching in horror as they morphed into shadow creatures, stretched taunt by moonlight, skittering like beetles against rock, out of their throat creaks and screeches as the voices tore at him from the inside out. “Mother!”

And finally he succumbed to the darkness, the darkness with no dawn, without the promise of warm sunlight breaking through the shell of night. And he saw in his dreams bloodshed and war, red caught in the light, heard the mournful voices the—we have to do something we can’t leave him alone—

He awoke drenched in sweat, his arms and legs tied down, the flesh of his tongue aching from his bite, his throat sore and coppery with his own blood. He threw up helplessly, and his father and the healer rushed to his side, Zeno was awake and wild as he spluttered out, his voice cracking and barely audible,

“The village is going to be attacked!”

* * *

Zeno desperately tried to explain. He had seen it in a dream, of course, but the dream had been too lifelike to not be true. There was a king, a king who was throwing everything into turmoil. An army was coming to try to claim their lands, and they needed to do something or else risk being killed. 

But no one believed him. An oracle? Zeno? No, he had just been sick with grief. He was a carefree boy who liked to smile at everyone. Perhaps he was lying in order to gain attention. After all, he was still a boy. Children did that on occasion. And eventually, even Zeno began to believe them. After all, he saw his own father turn away from him in shame as he had desperately beseeched the village elders. Watched as the others looked upon his own father in pity. Surely everything had to be his imagination. And nothing happened, and Zeno, though that nightmarish vision stayed close to his heart, began to ignore the voices. If he ignored them and paid them no mind, then they drifted into the edge of his consciousness. They were simply a product of his imagination. He told himself he didn’t care as the years began to slip through the cracks and he grew older. Zeno would smile and make his father happy, make it up to him for all the pain and embarrassment that he had caused him. After all, his kind father had suffered enough over the years. So Zeno ignored the sinking feeling he felt as the village caught wind of a king rising to the west, ignored the ill omens that made him shiver as the wind shifted, ignored the fragments of dreams and the chaos that bubbled in his mind.

And then, one day, when Zeno and the villagers watched as a swath of smoke and chaos tore through the valley, Zeno knew he had made a grave mistake.

* * *

The village had managed to repulse the invaders rather bloodlessly, but Zeno was left shaking by the riverbed. He had seen it. Seen it all before. And that had to mean that the red-haired king also was true. That somehow, he was hearing the words of the Gods, catching glimpses into the future.

And for some reason, he was happy.

He was happy because he wasn’t crazy. Zeno was happy because perhaps, all that suffering in the silence had been worth something. Zeno had something he could do, something he could do to make the world better. If he could convey the words of the Gods, perhaps he could help divert tragedy where tragedy might be sowed. Perhaps he could stop the grieving and the loss of innocence in others where it could be preventable. Maybe no one in the village he lived in would ever believe him, but maybe, perhaps, he could find others who did, maybe others like him. But most importantly, if he listened to the Gods, if he accepted them, perhaps they could tell him what his purpose truly was in this world.

Zeno felt truly light, truly happy, and for the first time in his entire life, he closed his eyes and he listened.

“Come here, young one.”

A voice tore threw him like thunder, sending him folding under the weight of its voice. For a moment he remained there, shaking upon the mud of the river bank, before he began to run. Run to where that voice had broken through his darkness, filling him with light. He ran until his lungs burned and his skin prickled and his legs begged him to stop but he didn’t stop until he broke free of the forest and onto the cliff. Zeno stopped, confused and alarmed, half ready to return back to the village where his father was surely awaiting his return.

But it was then, as the clouds parted, that a Golden Dragon descended from the heavens.

* * *

“You called me here?” Zeno asked the Dragon who looked upon him.

“I have always been calling to you, but never before have you listened.” The Golden Dragon informed him, and Zeno felt his lips tug into a smile despite himself.

“I’m sorry about that.” Zeno said with an awkward laugh, rubbing the back of his neck. “I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with this oracle-business if I’m being completely honest.”

“But somehow, you have overcome your fears.” The Dragon told him, “Hiryuu has descended to Earth, which you know, and my brothers and I have been trying to discuss whose best to protect him. My brothers, with good intentions, have chosen warriors with warrior hearts, but somehow I do not feel that this is appropriate. To be by Hiryuu’s side, I wish for there to be someone without a heart hardened. I wish for there to be someone to be his companion, his family, to stay by his side in times of hardship and to elate him when he is in pain. For this reason, I wish for you to become a Dragon Warrior.” 

“A Dragon Warrior?” Zeno asked, looking up at the glorious figure that had descended from the sky, however his awe did not break him from his practicality. “I’m not a hero, nor am I strong. I cannot become a warrior. But, if someone like me can make the world and everyone in it a bit better and happier then give that Dragon blood to me.”

* * *

Zeno awoke to familiar faces, brothers in a different time.

“Come here.” He bid and he watched Yona and the others lean down, a prime catch to yank down into his arms.

“What is it?” Kija asked, confused.

“…a shoving game?” Shin-ah asked, and Zeno heard Jaeha sigh and Yona squeak in confusion and amusement.

“Haha. There, there!” Zeno said, patting their heads, feeling a smile rise up to his face. A smile like the ones long ago shared between different families, but all just as precious to him. So often he had cursed his decision, and his subsequent life. But somehow, thinking back on the wonderful people he had met, it had to be worth it.

“You’ve all…grown up so much…”

And so continued the neverending story.


End file.
